Jack MacRoary's Guide to the Independence Referendum:Episode Five

Genre:HumourSwearwords: One mild one only.Description:Hope
over Fear; Falling out with the Kindle Cronies; and John does something
amazing._____________________________________________________________________When
I was ten and eleven, I used to find life really complicated. But do you know
something? Now I find it really simple. Life is simple, it’s the adults who
complicate it.They say things like
‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ When they should say ‘it’s the people, stupid’, or
perhaps ‘it’s the politicians, stupid.’Or even ‘it’s the stupid politicians.’ Though it’s not really nice to
say anyone is stupid, even if they behave so because stupid is a point of view
like most things are.Too many people
have called Brian the Brain stupid to my face and I know he’s the cleverest
person of them all. So I don’t like the word stupid.But politicians do try your patience, don’t
they? Perhaps that’s because a week really is a long time in politics. Though
dad says that politics is like Groundhog Day. Uncle Tam disagrees because he
says things only get worse every time a politician opens their mouth. You can
see that we have high level political debate in the MacRoary (and Maxwell)
households this weather.

But back to stupid. When I was five or six and people used to call me names (before I knew Brian so I don’t know if they called him names but I expect they did and I don’t know if he knew the rhyme I’m going to tell you but I think he didn’t) mum said I had to say to them ‘sticks and stone may break my bones but names can never hurt me.’ I tried it a few times. It didn’t work. I even stuck my tongue out a few times when I said it, but that didn’t work either. Nothing really works against bullies, does it? That’s the problem. So even though I’m a pacifist really, because that’s the way my mum brought me up, I get into quite a lot of trouble because people call Brian stupid. And of course the trouble is all not because he is stupid but because people call him names. And because that rhyme never works, I stand up for him the way my dad taught me. Because my dad says that when you know you are in the right you have to stand up for yourself. And that’s the same even if it’s not yourself you’re standing up for. More even. Because if someone calls me names or bullies me, I just don’t bother with them any more but if they do it to Brian, I will stand up for him because if he stands up for himself it’s called ‘challenging behaviour’ and he can get taken away from our school, whereas if I stand up for him I’m just a naughty boy who will get a detention. So I stand up for Brian. With my fists if necessary. Which is when the trouble starts. But I don’t care. I’d do detentions every day of the week for Brian and he’d do them for me. It’s not a bromance, don’t think that. We’re not gay or anything. We’re just friends and like Brian says ‘I’m on the side of truth.’ If people don’t understand Brian that’s their problem. And if they tell me he’s stupid then they know what to expect. And don’t go running crying to the lunch ladies. I don’t want you to think that my mum is a pacifist and my Dad isn’t. My dad is not a violent man at all but he does think you need to stand up for your rights. And when my mum said it was ‘Neanderthal’ that he should teach me to defend myself with my fists, he said that she had to realise that burning your bra was not the way to stand up for your rights. I don’t know what they were talking about really, but that’s the way of parents and history. They just don’t make sense most of the time. Anyway, Dad taught me a great little jab and hook combination that means that now when I have to defend Brian it’s the other boy who goes crying to the lunch ladies. Not me. Don’t get me wrong, I never start a fight. But I stop it dead in its tracks. And that’s what makes me a pacifist in my opinion. I don’t know how long it will take the message to get through. Names can hurt people. Sticks and stones can really hurt people and nuclear weapons… that’s just asking for trouble. Trident isn’t just a waste of money, it’s an accident waiting to happen, my mum says. My mum has a lot of opinions, like all mums do. Comes with the territory, dad says. So when mum says we don’t need nuclear deterrents, we just need people to be reasonable, we should listen to her. Because mums know best. But you don’t need a mum to tell you that Trident is a waste of money. It’s obvious. Because we’ll never use it and if we did we’d all die. And Uncle Tam says there’s loads of oil in the Irish Sea which we could take out if we didn’t have Trident there and that would make us all a lot richer than the jobs they have in Helensburgh at the moment because of it. But people don’t look to the future, Uncle Tam says. He says we need ‘hope over fear.’ And for people to keep their promises. If a man can’t give you a straight answer and can’t look you in the eye while he does it, he’s not much of a man, my dad says. The exception is Brian of course because he’s autistic and that makes it difficult for him to look anyone in the eye. There are exceptions to every rule – if it’s good enough for grammar it’s good enough for Brian, I say. You have to judge everything based on the evidence in front of your eyes. And common sense. As well as rules. And Brian makes up for not looking you in the eye because he gives the straightest answer you’ll ever hear. He is on the side of truth after all. So, in my story we’re about at August now and things are really hotting up. I’ll try and tell you the important things – Mr McStoryteller and Mr Marker both told me that since I have hindsight as my guide I should know what the important things are, but I think different things are important to different people so I’m going to try and tell you what was important to all of us in the month before the election. And because we’re a family, they might get mixed together a bit because we do stand up for each other. And you have to realise that, especially when I tell you what my brother John did. Because it wasn’t violence. It was standing up for my mum. It was hope over fear. It was awesome. My brother John threw an egg at Jim Murphy. And why did he do it? Here’s why. One day we found my mum crying. She’d been cyberbullied by Ms Mammakaski. Yes. My mum. Cyberbullied. Ms Mammakaski was one of my mum’s Kindle Cronies. She lives in DrumTumshie and they had been friends since I was a wee boy, long before Kindles or tablets were even invented. That’s not all true because of course the Romans had tablets but they weren’t ipads, they were wax ones and you couldn’t read ebooks on them or do Facebook. Or cyberbully someone. What happened was. Once my mum had 1000 Facebook Friends and was campaigning ‘in a positive hope over fear manner’, as Uncle Tam pointed out, Ms Mammakaski got all annoyed. Ms Mammakaski – who insists that you call her Ms not Miss or Mrs, though she is married with a son Christopher – told the other Kindle Cronies that my mum wasn’t reading her ebooks any more and that they should chuck her out of the Kindle Cronies group because she ‘wasn’t pulling her weight.’ And Ms Mammakaski even then accused my mum of bullying her. Uncle Tam was about to go round and give Charles (that’s Mr Grierson, who is Mr Mammakaski) and Christopher ‘a piece of his mind.’ Christopher is called Christopher Grierson-Mammakaski which is a hell of a name but we call him GM Chris (and John says he looks genetically modified into the bargain). Anyway, Uncle Tam didn’t go and panel them all, though they likely deserved it. Because, he said, it was just what they wanted. He said it can be a cunning tactic of bullies, to bully you and then say you are bullying them. He said it’s to do with definitions of free speech. (Which is why sometimes I think it’s easiest just to give the person a quick smack to stop them.) And Uncle Tam said he thought it was ‘ripe’ of Clarys Mammakaski to fight for Feminism when she wouldn’t fight for a nation’s right of self-determination. I didn’t understand him but I think he might have a point. Freedom is freedom after all. How can you want women to be free but not want Scottish people (men and women) to be free? Where’s the inequality in that? Where’s the sense? Where, as Mr Marker would ask, is the joined up thinking? What happened is that Ms Mammakaski ‘took objection’ to Mum sending out her messages of Hope over Fear to her friends on Facebook. Ms Mammakaski was one of mum’s 1000 Facebook Friends and when we found mum crying and asked her why she said: ‘Because Clarys has blocked me on Facebook.’ (Clarys is Ms Mammakaski’s first name obviously.) And so I thought Mum was upset because now she only had 999 Facebook Friends and that would make her feel less important in the world and I said, ‘Mum, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get another Facebook Friend soon to make it back to 1000.’And Mum said it wasn’t about that, and in fact she now had over 1500 FB friends but it was about how Clarys had gone about things and how she was calling her a bully (Clarys calling my Mum that is!) because she was speaking about what she believed in. Seems like Ms Mammakaski had gone all round the Kindle Cronies saying that my mum was being ‘divisive’ and that the whole Independence thing was terrible because the Nationalists were just bullies who didn’t let anyone else have their say. Which seems rich from her (my dad said) because it was Clarys Mammakaski who firstly stopped my mum from saying what she felt and secondly it was Clarys Mammakaski who blocked my mum on FB which is like saying ‘I hate you and I don’t want to be your friend in real life either.’ And that was why my Mum was crying. Dad said she couldn’t be much of a friend if that’s what she did. But it didn’t cheer Mum up. Uncle Tam said it was iniquitous because Ms Mammakaski was trying to set the rules of who could say what. Mum was happy for Ms Mammakaski to have her own opinions. She knew Ms Mammakaski was a No voter – she even said to us that we had to respect diverse opinion. She said it was about managing expectations and that Ms Mammakaski came from Czechoslovakia originally and so she didn’t expect her to truly understand what Scottish Independence could mean. Uncle Tam said that you’d have thought Czechoslovakians might understand it better than most – being what they used to be Czechoslovakia and now they are the Czech Republic. Anyway, every time Mum said anything about Independence on Facebook to anyone, Ms Mammakaski accused her of bullying. But she didn’t think it was bullying to constantly say that the ‘Nationalists were being divisive and bullying and that they should shut up.’ Which she said on Facebook all the time. She said they should shut up and stop ruining the country for everyone. And my Mum didn’t even ‘rise to the bait’ on that one. Ms Mammakaski kept saying the nationalists were stifling debate but as soon as anyone did debate with her (if they had a different opinion) she called them a bully. Like my Mum. Mum wasn’t her only victim. Mum didn’t even ask Ms Mammakaski to vote yes. She didn’t even talk directly to her at all. Ms Mammakaski just objected to my mum even being on Facebook talking about Independence. I think she was probably just jealous that my Mum now had more friends than her. And that some of Ms Mammakaski’s friends agreed with Mum and not with her. My Mum was super fair. She always is. Even when you don’t like it. She always says we have to respect other people’s views. Even Ms Mammakaski’s. She calls it ‘managing expectations.’ She says she’s learned it from twenty five years with my dad. And my dad said he would respect anyone’s views until it made his wife cry and then they’d better watch out. But bullies come in many guises, my dad says. And Uncle Tam says that Scotland has always been divided and it’s because ‘there’s too many aspirational noses in the trough and too few people committed to Social Justice’ (that’s a quote not plagiarism by the way and I think it’s every bit as good as what most politicians say, even better!). So everyone was trying to make mum feel better but John took direct action. And. It was awesome. Do you know about Jim Murphy? My dad saw him on the telly one day and said that if John had been Jim Murphy he’d have drowned him at birth. And that might be what gave John the idea. Because Jim Murphy was a Unionist (even if he says now he isn’t) and he was going round Scotland on an Irn Bru crate telling us all how we should be Better Together. That riled a lot of people because Irn Bru is Scottish as heather and Uncle Tam said it was a cheap stunt (well, he added a few other words to the sentence to fill it out, but that was the gist of it). And it turned out that the day after Ms Mammakaski blocked my Mum on FB – which was the day that the Kindle Cronies were asked to vote her out of the group (which never happened by the way because the Kindle Cronies decided they were apolitical – which means they didn’t give a fig or feather - as mum would say – or an arse – as Uncle Tam would say – about politics, they just wanted to read books, drink wine and eat cakes – a sort of modern WRI if you like without the competitive element). WRI is like Young Farmers for women of a certain age, Uncle Tam says. Anyway, this story is more shaggy than our dog Bisum, but I’m coming to the point. Jim Murphy came to DrumTumshie on his 100 towns in 100 days tour. And John threw an egg at him. And this is where you can’t believe what you see on the news. Because the news will tell you that it happened in Kirkcaldy, and that a man was sentenced and convicted of doing it. And that did happen. Of course it did. BUT it happened first at DrumTumshie. John did it first. John threw the first egg. But no one said. Perhaps it was because there weren’t cameras at the DrumTumshie event. It was awesome though. Even though, as mum said, it was a waste of a good egg. And even though she said he shouldn’t have done it and he could have got in a lot of trouble and how did he think that getting sent to prison would make her happy. But she was happy all the same, I know she was. John did it as an act of direct action. His first real political act. And my dad said he’d never been so proud of his son doing a daft thing in his life and that it was no more of an insult than Jim Murphy coming to DrumTumshie on an Irn Bru crate and pontificating to us about Scotland. So you see, it’s pretty hard to work out what the real rules of life are sometimes. Because we know that bullying is bad, but you can’t always know who the real bully is. And we know that throwing eggs is just silly, if not dangerous (like snowballs, you could take someone’s eye out, or conkers), but so is standing on an Irn Bru crate shouting at people. And Uncle Tam said Jim Murphy had it coming to him and wanted John to join Radical Independence then and there because he had ‘promise’ but John said he only did it to make my mum happy and proud of him. And I said, ‘I don’t expect we can get Jim Murphy to be your Facebook Friend now mum, can we?’ And then she laughed. And John didn’t get arrested and the Kindle Cronies told Ms Mammakaski to keep politics out of fiction and things sort of went back to normal. As normal as it could be a month before the BIG VOTE. But Mum and Ms Mammakaski haven’t spoken even still to this day, which my dad says is totally pathetic because it was Clarys whose side WON and it was Clarys who said it was DIVISIVE and who is being divisive now by not talking to her friend. And my mum had been a good friend to Clarys Mammakaski over the years. So it seems harsh that not only did she have to face the disappointment of us not getting Independence but that she had to lose a friend over the whole sorry affair. I would never stop being friends with Brian the Brain, even if he voted No. Which he wouldn’t because he’s not stupid. But that’s nothing compared to what happened next. You’ll have to come back next week to find out.

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About the Author

Jack MacRoary, also known locally as the Bard of DrumTumshie, comes from the small farming community of Tattybogle, which he has singlehandedly put ‘on the map’ through his fame. After bursting onto the literary cultural scene in August 2012 when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy. His current ebooks are Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here) and More Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here). He is also the first McStorytellers McSerial writer.

Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.